Linked Heritage Experience in Linking Heritage Information

The Linked Heritage Project started in April 2011. It is funded by the European Commission under the IST Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), and runs for 30 months. Its main objective is to contribute a large quantity of new content to Europeana, from both the public and private sectors (c3 million items). In addition, the project will show how: 1. To enhance the quality of Europeana content, in terms of its metadata richness, its re-use potential and its uniqueness; 2. To enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content. The author is working in this project, specifically as lead partner in the work package Linking Cultural Heritage Information. This will, amongst other things, be exploring best practice report on cultural heritage linked data and metadata standards. This paper will give some results of the research that has been undertaken. Questions that will be answered include: “What is linked data? Is all of it Open? Which standards are being used? What use is being made of linked a data in cultural heritage at the moment?”